He said that he was 28, had just come out of the closet last year, and he enjoyed pissing on guys and hate-fu*king. We were at Barracuda in Chelsea, and after about 30 minutes of talking, he told me that he’d love to fu*k me but he has a boyfriend but could he get my number just in case? Sure.

Riding home with a 23-year-old later, I received a text that read, “Good to meet u rich. let me piss on u sometime get off grindr.” I told him, “You can piss on me when you love me,” and also when he’s single. He called me heteronormative. I don’t think he got the Showgirlsreference, so it probably wasn’t a match anyway. Sucks, because he was cute and wore a baseball cap that made him cuter.

Funny how Pride and regret go hand-in-hand.

More:

All kinds of petty revelations. For example, I don’t really want to be pissed on. It’s something I’ve been curious about, but only because other people put it in my head. I have no sex associations with urinals or bathrooms. No seed from my past is flourishing into a pee fetish. But it seems benign enough of an activity to see for myself what it’s all about. It’s like, if other people are into it and you can do it, why not try it? Why not experience the wonderful range of activity that human sexuality, and specifically queerness offers?

I barely got to do that in my former relationship, which ended a little over two months ago. He didn’t want to pee on me and wouldn’t to appease my curiosity and now for the first time in nine and a half years, I can guiltlessly pursue that or whatever or whoever. So far, it’s been fun and exhausting, life-affirming and soul-sucking.

Most consistently, it’s been a source of new ways of feeling the same shame that has manifested itself throughout my sex life, from early on when I had sex with a woman and worried about getting her pregnant and the homosexuality that made my mind wander during sex and my eye wander otherwise. The shame found ways to wind itself through my former relationship, through infidelity and sexual isolation and performance anxiety. It’s so trite to chalk it up to a Catholic upbringing, but I can’t help wondering if I’m addicted to sin or something like that.

Intellectually, I am proud to be gay. I don’t need a weekend for it, but I’ll take one to be extra gay because that’s how much I love it. I wonder what this persistence of shame means about me spiritually and emotionally. I experienced so much of it last weekend, between and during fantastic times, these wholly positive social interactions with one great, beautiful, friendly person after the next. My gayness is haunted.

Read the whole thing. He ends up deciding that he might like to engage in an orgy in which fellow gay men have sex with lesbians, because that seems like the most transgressive thing he can do.

Who lives this way? Damn.

UPDATE: Interesting stuff going on in the comments section of that post. For example:

I just hope no one stumbles across your article and assumes this is normal behavior for gay men. You are more of a child who never really grew up, or a teenager who never learned to control their hormones. Guys like you, seriously, are the reason WE will never be taken seriously by the voting majority. Guys like you, are the reason I am not “allowed” to marry someone of my own gender. Guys like you make it difficult to hold my head up and be proud, as a gay man struggling for equality.

That being said, enjoy your juvenile existence while you still have it. It’s not my place to say your choices are the wrong ones or the right ones. My place is to say that you make it so much more difficult for the rest of us who just want to be seen as equals with everyone else.

The author turns around and calls this commenter a self-hating gay.

UPDATE.2: From an essay last year by Thomas Rogers, a Salon editor, about an elite gay Manhattan party he went to:

I remember the exact moment I realized it was time to leave the sex party and go home. It was 7:30 in the morning, and I was standing in front of a bunch of cots filled with piles of naked men. A man dressed in a leather jacket emblazoned with the words “human urinal” was next to me, a funnel strapped to his face. And as I stood there contemplating the circumstances that had led me to this place, a man wearing nothing but a harness and underwear staggered down the hallway and accidentally pressed up against me. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed to his friend, as his wet skin rubbed up against my arm. “Some guy must have pissed ALL OVER my shoulder!”

I had spent the last six hours at the Black Party, a giant gay event that takes place every year at Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan. Every March, thousands of shirtless men cram into the large concert venue in midtown to dance to world-famous house DJs, do lots of drugs and, once 3 a.m. rolls around, have public sex in various parts of the building. For three decades, the party has been a raunchy high point of the gay calendar in New York, and a throwback to the most hedonistic aspects of pre-AIDS gay culture. (This year’s party will take place on Saturday, March 19.)

I had come here to confirm several of my long-cherished beliefs about sex and gayness: that sex in all of its forms was awesome, that gay men’s permissive attitudes toward it were much saner than the straight community’s, and that events like this one were a healthy celebration of the most transgressive elements of gay life that had preceded me. But as the night progressed, my attitude went from excitement to discomfort to utter revulsion — and I began to wonder, did I even belong here?

More:

This was what I’d come for: a bacchanal of shamelessness and free sexual expression. It embodied the radical gay politics I thought were lacking in my generation of gay men, so concerned with marriage and adoption and fitting in. But now that I was seeing it firsthand, I found myself strangely disconcerted.

Well, yeah. Read the essay if you have a strong stomach, and take in his description of the things he saw. But he cannot bring himself to condemn it, only say that it’s not for him:

That doesn’t mean that men won’t or shouldn’t keep having sex in dark rooms or on pool tables in front of large crowds, but it means that, as the march toward the mainstream continues, it’ll probably become increasingly uncommon. And it doesn’t mean I’m not grateful — over the last few decades, those hordes of kinky gay men paved the way for my sexual freedom. I like that the Black Party exists. I like that it makes people uncomfortable. And I never want to go there again.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, the hetero “funga” culture is rocking and rolling, AIDS be damned. The NYT observer who writes about it calls it “female empowerment.” Naturally.

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58 Responses to Shame

Dave Dutcher, I do agree with your 10:58 comment. Because Geoff has me in a thoughtful mood, I’d like to look at this in a different way for a moment.

Does anybody think that a culture that really embraces depravity is a culture that is sustainable?

I worry a lot about sustainability. Factory farms bother me; giant multinational corporations with no loyalty to the American worker, the community, or the environment bother me; a culture where consumerism is the highest social value bothers me–and all because I don’t think any of these things are endlessly sustainable. I think they’ll fall apart, sooner or later, and that when they do we’ll start finding out what “too big to fail” really means.

And in many ways, aside from my honest concern (yes, really) about the immortal souls and eternal destinies of people who embrace rampant sexual sin of any sort–heterosexual, homosexual, etc.–I have to wonder if a culture in which chastity is considered an odd notion and virginity an embarrassing pre-teen state to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible is even remotely sustainable.

Consider the impact on families of no-fault divorce. Consider the impact on social welfare of rising numbers of out-of-wedlock births, and the necessity of bigger and stronger social programs to pick up the slack. Consider the problem of what Rod called “feral children,” children who don’t have a clue what a normal family looks like and who are openly and abjectly suffering because of it. Consider the impact on communities of the breakdown of morality, the push to exploit and objectify the human body in advertising, media, and a growing mainstreaming of porn, the normalizing of a hyperseuxalized culture which seeks to dress even toddlers in “hot” outfits, the reeducation of young and old to believe that there really isn’t any such thing as perversion–it’s all a matter of taste–and so on.

Consider the public health impact of STD prevention and treatment programs and the cost of these to insurers both public and private. Consider the number of lifestyle-based illnesses, diseases, and conditions that once afflicted mainly sex workers and a handful of the more promiscuous members of society, but which are drawing larger and larger amounts of money every year to diagnose and treat.

Consider the social and economic costs of treating marriage like a temporary agreement that has nothing to do with the raising of children…

Is this sustainable? Will it continue to be, when even more taboos fall and even more pressure to accept as equal any and all sexual partnerships and groupings and any parenting arrangements, etc. is pushed into the mainstream?

Anybody who has read Sorokin or Zimmerman realizes that there’s never been a time in history when sexual liberation and the exaltation of the pleasure of the individual as the highest possible good has just built endlessly upon itself with no reaction against it, no weakening of the nation or culture immersed in it, no destruction from without or within. In fact, a culture’s embrace of this atomized individualism paired with a sensate society is usually the last stage before a total cultural collapse, which is usually devastating to the people who have to live through it.

How close are we to that? How much closer can we get before we’ve gone too far, and we find out that no culture headed in the direction ours is headed in has ever survived and flourished?

The lesson of this article: take one (for all we know, embellished) story about a sub-culture you find distasteful and apply it to the broader population.

Therefore, because a hetero colleague of mine who is heavily involved in the local straight BDSM scene (to the point of organizing gatherings) and was even arrested once when police busted one of his events, it is fair to assume that all straights are leather daddy freaks with police records. Thanks.

Re: Besides, the cult of Dionysos in classical Athens gave the world drama.

And also comedies which would be slapped with an X-rating if they were translated without heavy bowdlerization and performed with actors, er, attired as they were then.

Geoff,
My condolences on your loss. If anyone chides you for loving an animal too much send them to me and I will give them a Reading From Jon that will leave their ears ringing. I lost a cat last month (poisoned, I now believe– the city has been putting out rat poison and he died very suddenly having been healthy as a horse all his life) and while some may scoff I am doing, privately, forty days of mourning for him. His picture is on the candle stand in my icon corner and next Tuesday on the 40th day I will sing a hymn and say some prayers and have a catnip party for the other cats and a glass of Chambord for me. No, animals are not people, but death is still death and the barb still stings like a scorpion.

Amusing to see so many here try to draw equivalence between a thousandfold public un-safesex orgy and committed couples who indulge in kinks and/or porn.

In “Skipping Towards Gomorrah,” Dan Savage noted that the very “reddest” cities and suburbs he’d ever been in all had swinger clubs, strip clubs, and a porn viewing rate as high or higher than average. Upperclass British men were notorious for their delights in dominatrixes circa the 19th century, amidst their managing their families and acting as pillars of the community as their caste demanded.

Let me point out that gay men being in-your-face about sexuality is not too different than straight men doing the same. But the straight men, having to avoid frightening the straight women, sublimate their macho identity into sports and aggression.

It is different though. The difference is that way too many gay men think what this guy is doing is right enough to warrant giving him his own column on Gawker and calling him “a gay sex enthusiast,” as opposed to people like Tucker Max or Chelsea Handler who are viewed more or less as scum and what you don’t want to grow up as.

You guys are arguing equivalence based on the absolute worst actions of the straights, actions we know are harmful to relationships and life like that somehow makes it better. Do you think that Al Bundy’s love of the strip club is a model of how we feel about it, or that straight swingers aren’t decadence of the highest order?

Watch any random hard core internet porn and you will see heterosexuals – some of whom may even be married couples – engage in the same and even more debauched behaviour.

Googling the search term “anal” for instance links to 157 MILLION video clips.

I really don’t want to look at the list too closely but (barring one which seems to be genuinely about dog grooming) the top 10 all appear to be videos of heterosexuals engaging in anal sex produced for the viewing pleasure of heterosexuals – many of whom will be pillars of YOUR community, standing beside you in church etc….

If I had the stomach I could do equivalent searches for the other practices you mention but am pretty sure that you’d see very similar results.

What is different is that because there are fewer women who are willing to indiscriminately rut with complete strangers without payment it takes more effort for heterosexuals to find a large semi-public orgy of the type that you describe.